Single father of 6 US citizen children sought a special visa; ICE still deported him

Rosalio Vasquez Meave had just dropped his kids at school in Oklahoma when officers with Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested him.

After his arrest in September, Vasquez Meave — the sole caretaker of his six children, all of them U.S. citizens under the age of 16 — was deported last month to Mexico after having lived in the U.S. for more than 34 years.

He had a valid work permit and was the caretaker of his children since he was granted primary custody after he divorced his ex-wife four years ago. The problems with his ex-wife and subsequent divorce prompted him to apply for a visa under the Violence Against Women Act that is available for men and women who suffer abuse or cruelty at the hands of a U.S. citizen spouse.

He applied for the visa in 2023 with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. In 2023, the agency determined his application met the basic requirements for eligibility — known as a favorable prima facie determination — and issued a work permit as his application was pending. The agency reaffirmed its initial decision in 2024 and again in April.

“I told them that I had six kids, that I was a single father taking care of my kids,” Vasquez Meave said from Matamoros, Mexico, in a brief phone interview with The Dallas Morning News. “They didn’t care.”

The father wouldn’t see his children for almost three months.

As President Donald Trump’s administration has pushed forward with his mass deportation campaign, one of the consequences has been policy changes that affect individuals who have pending applications for victim-based immigration benefits. In February, the Trump administration rescinded a prior policy implemented under former President Joe Biden that asked ICE to use prosecutorial discretion when they encounter an individual who has a pending application for a victim-based visa.

The decision to rescind the 2021 memo could affect thousands of people who have pending VAWA visas with USCIS. More than 100,000 applications are pending for a self-petitioning spouse, according to federal government data through the end of June.

It is unclear how many individuals have been deported while their cases are pending, however, because the federal government does not publish such data.

Michelle Edstrom, who is Vasquez Meave’s attorney, said his deportation shows that the administration is attempting to deport as many people as possible.

“They’re just going after anybody and everybody is what I see, no matter if they have applications pending or not,” Edstrom said.

The prior policy did not provide blanket protection for every pending applicant. ICE could still arrest an individual if they were deemed a public safety or national security threat, said Jonathan Micale, a former USCIS executive who oversaw the division of the agency that handles such cases and who retired from the agency earlier this year.

In Vasquez Meave’s case, his September arrest resulted in his kids being separated from their father and caretaker. Edstrom asked officials at the Dallas ICE office to release him, writing his removal “would cause exceptional and extremely unusual hardship” to his children.

ICE deported him on Nov. 24.

His children stayed in the country for an additional two weeks but rejoined their father in early December in Mexico, the first time they’d seen him in almost three months.

When he was deported, his application was still pending with USCIS, Edstrom said.

“There should have been a final adjudication of his VAWA case,” Micale said.

USCIS declined to comment on his case.

Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, said in a statement that “pending applications do not confer legal status.”

Vasquez Meave was deported in 2000 but crossed back into the country illegally. ICE reinstated his final order of removal, McLaughlin added.

“He has received full due process,” the statement said.

‘This shouldn’t have happened’

For Deborah Beneteau, who has known Vasquez Meave since he was 15 years old, his arrest and deportation revealed the challenges with the Trump administration’s one-size-fits-all approach to immigration enforcement.

She said she is a Trump supporter who has voted for the president in all three of his presidential campaigns. She said she doesn’t think Vasquez Meave should have been arrested and deported for being undocumented.

“There should have been somebody with a heart that stepped in and said, ‘Let’s hear this case, let’s see what we can do to get this straightened out.’ He’s really a good person,” Beneteau, 70, told The News.

“This shouldn’t have happened,” she added.

Beneteau met Vasquez Meave when he was a teenager and his uncle asked Beneteau, who owned a construction company, if his nephew could work for her. He was quiet but a hard worker, she remembered, and she hired him to paint and do general construction.

A few months after they met, realizing his home life wasn’t stable, Beneteau had him move in with her and her two children. In Mexico, Vasquez Meave dropped out of school before he finished elementary school so he could work. In Oklahoma, Beneteau tried to help him get his education through the local Methodist church.

“I helped Leo build a future,” she said. “I helped him get a home.”

A problem for Vasquez Meave came in 2000, when he was 23, and he went back to Mexico because of an imminent death in the family. Vasquez Meave and Beneteau said he was scammed out of $600 in Mexico after he thought he was getting a legitimate green card.

He presented the card at a port of entry and was arrested for fraud at entry, government records show. He was deported to Mexico the same day. His 2000 arrest for fraud was the only criminal arrest The News could find for Vasquez Meave.

He crossed illegally back into the U.S. a few months later.

Vasquez Meave told The News he decided to go back to Oklahoma because he needed to work and make money to support his family.

As Vasquez Meave established his life in Oklahoma, he started his own small business to do construction and remodeling work for houses, as well as roofing and painting. He married and had six children. However, after his wife suffered from substance abuse, he filed for divorce after 11 years of marriage.

He was awarded full custody of his children, court records show.

Two years later, he applied for the visa under VAWA and received a favorable initial review from USCIS. The favorable decision did not mean his visa would be approved by the agency.

The average wait time for these cases is 38 months, according to USCIS’s July report to Congress.

‘I had hopes for him’

On the day he was arrested by ICE, his mom was on her way to Oklahoma from Mexico. Ever since the divorce that granted Vasquez Meave full custody of his children, his mom, Maria Trinidad Meave Delgado, would visit her son twice a year to help him care for them.

“He is both mom and dad, and with how many hours he works at his job, it was hard to care for his kids,” Meave Delgado said in an interview in Spanish.

She had to explain to her grandchildren that their father would not be coming home and it was unknown if he would be released by ICE.

Beneteau, meanwhile, worked to get an attorney for Vasquez Meave and help care for his children. She’s been known as “DeeDee” to them ever since they could talk. Beneteau was thrust into a position where she had to help care for the kids as well, occasionally cooking dinner for them, bringing them to church on Sundays and taking them trick-or-treating during Halloween.

“These kids are kind of traumatized,” Beneteau said.

Beneteau said she often thinks about Vasquez Meave’s arrest by ICE and Trump’s mass deportation campaign to deport anyone who is illegally in the country. She said she believes he should have been “left alone.”

“I love President Trump, don’t get me wrong, but they haven’t made provisions for these special cases at all,” she said. “It’s just cut-and-dried, black-and-white, you’re out. It’s not right.”

Beneteau had hoped ICE would release Vasquez Meave after they realized his detention affected children who are U.S. citizens. When they deported him, Beneteau said it broke her.

On Sunday, Dec. 7, Beneteau had to say goodbye to the children and Vasquez Meave’s mother as they headed to Mexico to rejoin him.

“I had hopes for him to come home to his children and have a life,” she said.